One
NOLAN
The SpongeBob SquarePants theme blared from my phone.
I silenced it right away, but the damage had been done. “Sorry.”
“Please tell me you’re not watching cartoons while we’re trying to have a meeting,” my cousin Brady Lund, CFO of Lund Industries, complained.
Cartoons? WTF? Why would he accuse me of that? Like I fucked around in meetings all the time?
Maybe you oughta tell him you were tempted to watch anything to drown out his boring, meandering drone.
“That’s Mimi’s ring tone. She’s home sick today and apparently she’s bored.”
“That’s why my son isn’t getting a cell phone until he’s responsible enough to use it,” Brady retorted.
“Shouldn’t be a problem since he’s only a couple of months old,” Ash said. “Can we get back to business?”
“By all means. What do you propose?” I looked at Brady, who’d just finished giving his preliminary first quarter revenue report before my phone’s untimely interruption.
Brady sighed and ran his hand through his dark, already disheveled hair before his gaze moved between me and our cousin Ash, the COO of Lund Industries. “To be honest, I’m uncomfortable giving my recommendations in present company. No offense, Nolan.”
Technically I was the odd man out in this session as I was the CEO . . . in waiting? In training? On deck? In the wings? I wasn’t the third power “C” in Lund Industries—yet—I’d step into the role of CEO of Lund Industries when my father, Archer Lund, stepped down.
No one saw that happening anytime soon.
I stood. “Have your admins give mine a shout after you’ve brought this up in executive session.” I headed toward the door, but I paused in the doorframe and faced them. “In the future, I prefer to be excluded when you need a sounding board for your recitation of bad news. No offense.”
“No need to get pissy, Nolan.”
“That wasn’t me being pissy. I just don’t want you to present me with a list of problems without allowing me to participate in a discussion of solutions.”
I stepped into the elevator and hit the down button. My office wasn’t on the same floor as the other executive offices.
Since Lund Industries owned the entire building, each Lund family member was fortunate enough to get his or her own space. As CEO, my father had the nicest office on the highest floor. His brother Monte, who was president of the board of directors, and his brother Ward, who handled corporate accounts, had separate offices but shared their floor with the executive boardroom. As CFO, Brady and the financial department had one entire floor to themselves. Same for Ash and the operations department. My cousin Annika headed the PR department, which shared a floor with marketing. My mother, my aunt Priscilla and my aunt Selka also had their own floor, which was home to the Lund Cares Community Outreach—LCCO—program, a foundation that funded numerous charities and events in the Twin Cities and across Minnesota.
The rest of the building had the usual sales, legal, acquisitions, international and research and development departments, each with a dedicated floor. We also had an entire floor designated as an employee lunchroom, break room and lounge.
For the decade I’d been working at Lund Industries, I’d spent time in every department. Starting out, I hadn’t even merited my own office space. My current office was in the cyber security wing on the IT floor. It wasn’t an impressive space, but it did have its own entrance that kept a buffer against the noise from the IT department, as well as a private elevator to the executive parking level. My admin’s area was considerably smaller than her colleagues’.
Correction: than his colleagues’.
Sometimes my brain reverted and got the gender wrong. My terrific PA, Sam, who’d been with me two years, had started to transition four months ago. My only concern when she told me about the change was that he’d intended to resign. But thankfully that hadn’t been the case.
I’ve had a diverse group of friends of all orientations my adult life, but seeing Samantha transition to Sam was a first for me. I was grateful it wasn’t a new situation to our HR department. So they were fully prepared to prepare me on handling an unfamiliar situation respectfully.
He glanced up. “How’d the meeting go?”
I paused at the edge of his desk. “Did you ever have a friend who forced you to listen to a presentation or a speech and you realized they were just practicing on you?”
Sam groaned. “Not again.”
“Afraid so. I don’t know if Brady expected me to tell him that his delivery was too dry or what, but I was too busy processing the information he was spewing out to realize that’s what it was. After he reached the end, they couldn’t discuss potential solutions with me, so the whole damn thing was pointless. Next time Brady’s admin Jenna calls for a meeting? Grill her on specifics of said meeting so I don’t waste my time.”
“Absolutely, sir.”
“Thank you.” I looked at the stack of messages next to his daily planner. “What’d I miss?”
“Six calls returned from Friday afternoon. Five were departmental. Chris from IT stopped in to remind you it’s Rube Goldberg appreciation week so you might see oddities throughout the IT floor. A woman named Janiece called twice. Once to say she had a memorable time with you this weekend, the second time to leave her number and request you call her.”
I frowned. “I don’t remember a woman named Denice.”
Sam shook his head. “J, not D. Ja-niece. Tall. Long red hair. Sparkly aqua-colored top. You mentioned her reminding you of the Little Mermaid. And before you give me that haughty eyebrow raise, the excess of information came from Miss Janiece herself . . . so you didn’t get her confused with someone else.”
“Hilarious. But the only place I went this weekend besides Jaxson and Lucy’s was my buddy Baylor’s birthday bash, for like an hour. This Janiece chick . . .” I racked my brain. “Might’ve been the one I talked to briefly as I stuffed my face with chicken wings. Or maybe the one I chatted with as we waited for our drinks.” I sighed. “I don’t remember.” I shot him a look. “Not because I had women lined up like I used to.”
Sam smirked. “Ah, now we’re talking about the good old days.”
I rolled my eyes.
“I’m just relaying the message, boss.”
“Much appreciated. Let’s hope she gets the message when I don’t call her back.” My gaze dropped to his skinny tie, an understated purple with modernist cubes in shades of black and gray. “Great tie.”